


anthem

by seventhswan



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie) Spoilers, Bisexual Female Character, Ensemble Cast, F/F, Female POV, Grief, Hopeful Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-28 17:33:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,371
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3863377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhswan/pseuds/seventhswan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>Wanda has always had a reflection, one that was her face but not her face. Her face but longer, her face but steelier-eyed, her face but sharper, wryer. A twelve-minutes-older face. A bully-beating, last-spoon-of-ice-cream-stealing face. A loved face.</p>
</blockquote><p>After everything, Wanda learns how to throw a punch, makes some friends, falls in love, and finds that there is still good in the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	anthem

**Author's Note:**

> NOTE ON TAGS: I didn’t tag this with major character death because nobody actually dies in the course of this story, it simply deals with the aftermath of a death that has already (canonically) occurred. _However_ , the death in question has a HUGE impact on this story, and if that is likely to trigger you, please steer clear.
> 
> Possible triggers: grief, one mention of a suicidal thought. If you find anything else that should be warned for, please let me know.

Wanda cultivates the memories of the time before the bombs as carefully as rare orchids, tends them tirelessly, shelters them from the rain. She remembers better than Pietro does – a side-effect of the experimentation, almost certainly - and sometimes when it’s late, when it’s cold, slips his hand into hers and says _tell me a story_.

Wanda goes into her library of memories, sorts through the shelves, caresses the butter-soft spine of each pristine volume as she decides what to pull down. She remembers herself and Pietro sat in front of birthday cakes, modest Christmases under the same tree that stayed green and shiny year after year. Remembers uncle Vanya, his hairy arms, his great big smile, the way he picked up both twins at once and hugged them to his chest, how they squealed and kicked with delight. 

Remembers their mother, her smile, the smell of turps that always hung around her, the way other mothers smelled of floral perfume. Remembers their father, the way he took them down to the water whenever they went to their aunt’s house in the country, smiled when Wanda got her belly dirty on the bank, trailing her fingers against the surface. He adjusted his glasses in an old, familiar movement and explained patiently about tadpoles and frogs, about cycles, about seasons and beginnings and endings.

Wanda remembers herself and her brother, very small, listening to the first English CD they ever owned. They learned every word, though they had no idea what they were saying. Their favorite had a big beat, enough to shake the apartment floor when they stomped along. She knows what the words were saying, now.

The man with the bow tells her she has a choice. She isn’t so sure.

 _Blow the doors off, bring the roof down_. That’s what the song said.

|

After the war, Wanda moves to the Compound with the others. She finds herself hiding in the shadows sometimes, watching Bruce, who reminds her of her father – Bruce stands exactly like he did, like he’s trying not to be noticed. He hitches his glasses up his nose the same way, too. Wanda turns, once or twice, to say so to Pietro, to confirm with a half-smile that he sees it too, but there isn't anyone at her shoulder anymore.

Wanda has always had a reflection, one that was her face but not her face. Her face but longer, her face but steelier-eyed, her face but sharper, wryer. A twelve-minutes-older face. A bully-beating, last-spoon-of-ice-cream-stealing face. A loved face.

In the early days at the Compound, Wanda stops looking in the mirror, because there is no-one at her shoulder, no other pair of eyes for her to meet when she can no longer stand the steady gaze of her own. There is nowhere to hide anymore.

“You make me miss having long hair,” Natasha says one day when Wanda is sitting at one of the tables in the mess hall of the new complex, eating glutinous mac and cheese with her shoulders up near her ears. Natasha is a friendly face, if glaringly pitying, but Wanda is still adjusting to a world where she doesn’t have Pietro to act as a filter between her and everyone else, and sometimes the noise is too much. Natasha slides her tray into the spot beside, and Wanda avoids her eyes.

Natasha reaches out a slow hand – slow, but not tentative. The kind of movement you’re supposed to make toward a dog when you’re not sure if it will bite: as if you _know_ it won’t. Wanda watches, stock still, as Natasha picks up a tangled strand hanging near Wanda's cheek. Focusing that close makes Natasha a scarlet-topped smudge in Wanda’s peripheral vision. Natasha smiles encouragingly.

“I used to have hair as long as yours,” she says. “You should let me see, sometime, if I can still remember all the braids I used to be able to do.”

Since Wanda stopped looking in the mirror she hasn’t brushed her hair as carefully. Natasha’s hint isn’t subtle, but it isn’t mean either. Wanda has no idea what she looks like anymore, and it’s odd to think that other people do. Sometimes Wanda feels as though she no longer even has a face.

She has the strangest feeling, the surest feeling, that if she turned and told Natasha that she likes her hair like this, that she’s a grown woman and Natasha is her coworker and not her mother, that Natasha would only smile that little half-smile, and say _sure, okay_. And then she'd leave it, and never mention it again. It’s that, more than anything, that carries Wanda into the common quarters that evening, where Natasha is sitting on the squashiest sofa, reading and insulting someone – Clint? – over the phone at the same time.

Natasha looks up and meets her eyes, widens them a little to let Wanda know that she’s acknowledged. Wanda stands in the middle of the room for a moment in indecision, trying to decide what to do with herself while Natasha winds up the conversation. Eventually she goes to her knees on the floor in front of Natasha, turning to rest her back against the sofa. The feeling is one of immediate, intense relief. All she has to do right now is sit, and she can do it perfectly.

Natasha hangs up the phone.

“Wanda?” she says, just barely a question. Wanda just lifts her hand with the comb in it, puts it up onto Natasha’s lap. Natasha is wearing pyjamas that look so, so soft. Wanda fights the urge to turn her cheek against Natasha’s thigh, close her eyes, wait for the world to stop turning.

Natasha puts her hand gently over the crown of Wanda’s head. There’s barely any pressure, just a steady warmth. Wanda tries to close her eyes against it, but it’s too late.

“You have such great thick hair,” Natasha sighs as she fixes the part down the middle, while Wanda cries steadily, the tears scudding silently down her cheeks. She presses her palms to her face, trying to catch them. 

Natasha clucks her tongue, thinking. 

“Let’s try a waterfall," she says finally. "I think you can carry it off.”

|

Wanda knows that Natasha would ask Bruce if he minded Wanda sitting alongside him in the lab, if Wanda let slip that that was what she wanted. She knows that Natasha is the closest to Bruce, and even if she wasn’t, she takes her role as joint first in command of the new Avengers very seriously. She’d make it happen.

It’s that certainty that stops Wanda. Bruce wouldn’t argue, but he wouldn’t want her there, watching him. Names followed Wanda both before and during the enhancement process; she’s always been quiet, intense, focused, wanting to go unnoticed, and so they called her a ghost, a witch, creepy. Her powers make it worse: she’s a flicker in the shadows, a nightmare only seen out of the corner of the eye.

So she stays away from the lab. She trains with Natasha and with Steve, who permanently has this look on his face like he’s about to ask her something, but only says _good job_. It's praise she feels as a warm wave right down to her toes every time, as though it’s the first. She catches herself, once, imagining the exact look Pietro would wear when he said _ahh, so that’s how it is, eh? Well, sister, you know what they say about the men in the uniform…._.

“What’s funny?” Steve asks her, this little anticipatory smile on his face, as though he can already taste the joke he’s about to be let in on, and it’s sweet.

Wanda shakes her head, biting the inside of her lip.

“It is nothing, I was just – thinking about something,” she says. Steve’s smile is so kind, soft and bright. Real, like Natasha’s.

“Well, you should think about it more often,” he says, draping his towel around the back of his neck. “I haven’t seen you look happy like that since you got here.”

She thinks, for a horrible moment, that he is going to chuck her under her chin and ruin everything. She braces herself for it, but it doesn’t come. He just looks at her like – looks at her with this fondness, and then he gets up, and walks away.

She winds up in the lab anyway in the coming weeks. She feels some sort of connection to some of the people who come and go in the Compound – Clint gave her the strength to join the fight and was with her brother at the end; Natasha’s little kindnesses towards her are uncountable; Steve understands how a burden carried beside someone who is helping you destroy gym equipment is a burden halved; Bruce looks like her dear father – but none, perhaps, more so than Helen.

It’s impossible to explain. All the Avengers saw what Ultron could do, in the end. Helen shouldn’t be special. It’s just that maybe Helen saw it more. Other than Wanda, Helen is the only one who has seen the inside of Ultron’s head, the horrors in there. 

Or maybe it’s that Helen was the first person Wanda saved.

“There are several people here with degrees who could do this much better than me,” Wanda says, when Helen tugs her into the lab and clears a space on a bench for her to sit, then starts requesting various shiny implements.

“You’re doing great!” Helen enthuses, waving a hand. A strand of her dark hair is sticking straight up. It's incongruous with her scrupulously neat lab scrubs. “Plus you’re a great sounding board, you don’t poke holes in my equations, unlike _some people_.”

Bruce winces and clasps a hand to his chest.

“I’m wounded,” he says. He’s wearing lab goggles over his glasses, and looks more like Wanda’s father than ever. It’s odd, because it makes Wanda sad to look at him, but almost painfully happy, too. A strange kind of pleasure-pain. It’s like the urge to pick a scab, that drive so intoxicating it defies reason.

Helen wrinkles her nose, but it’s not playful or teasing. She looks concerned, and oddly guilty.

“I understand, Wanda – just pinch me or something if I bore you, okay?” she says.

“Pinch you,” Wanda repeats without inflection. “Pinch you, in a lab full of very expensive, very breakable glass equipment.” 

It isn’t until she hears Bruce’s snort of amusement that she realizes it’s a tic she’s picked up from Natasha. Helen squirms.

“I just realized that _I_ might be having fun, but you’re probably not,” she says. She’s looking at a point just slightly over Wanda’s shoulder.

“I am having fun,” Wanda says, staring down at the beaker in her hand. It’s true.

|

The common quarters are always strewn with vacation brochures. It’s part of this strange game Natasha and Bruce have, where they try to find better deals on the same packages, and mostly wind up spending time reading particularly ridiculous selections from the puffed-up copy in stupid voices. Wanda thinks she understands the urge underneath it, the fact that the real joy in the game is the space it gives them, to pretend they’re the kind of people who might really use glossy brochures to decide whether they should go for two weeks in Hawaii or the Maldives.

Wanda has always loved to read, but she hasn’t owned more than a few books since the bombs. They’re bulky, cumbersome to carry if you move a lot, and a luxury, too, not like food or clothing. There had been lean times before they went to the base for the enhancement. Still, Pietro had bought her battered paperbacks for special occasions – their birthday, the anniversary of being rescued. She read them enough times that she could practically recite the stories from memory: fairytales and mythology were her favorite, stories of princesses and dragons, and gorgons and gods. So that they weren’t carrying too much with them, every so often she’d leave one behind somewhere public, hoping someone else who would love it would come along, would see past the curling corners and loosened pages to the value of the stories inside.

The books here aren’t the same. Wanda, obviously, can read in English, but it seems clunky compared to her mother tongue. The tales she grew up with seem foreign rendered in her third language, with all its limitations. She catches herself frowning and substituting words from her mother’s language in the margins in light pencil. There is no other word that conveys the meaning as well as this one, she thinks as she writes, as though she can talk to the editor from here, as though he will know somehow. As though anyone here in America cares about the Sokovian dialect.

So although she’s grateful for the books that come to the Compound, she finds her attention drifting. She leaves them behind in her room in the mornings, or on the bench after her lunch, and so when she finds herself alone in the common quarters, she winds up pulling Bruce and Natasha’s brochures into her lap, flicking through the over-exposed photos. She’s never seen any of these places. She’d never even been out of Sokovia before she met the Avengers.

She makes her own game: if she had three thousand dollars, where would she spend it on? What if she had five, or ten? It’s just something to keep her mind occupied. She sits and bites her nails and reads the brochures and she hasn’t room to think about anything, or anyone, else.

|

There’s a mandatory semi-fancy dinner the next night, half to encourage “team building” and half to celebrate the three-month anniversary of them moving into the Compound. Nobody seems to know exactly who organized it, but a reminder of the reservation is sent to everyone’s cellphones.

Wanda wears a yellow sundress that she bought on a trip with Natasha just a few days after she moved in to the Compound, those hazy, fuzzy days when she felt as though she was underwater all the time. It’s sunshine yellow, something she shoved into her closet and thought she’d never actually wear. She feels self-conscious until Helen gasps enviously over it when she knocks on Wanda’s door so they can go down to the waiting cars together.

The restaurant is a mid-scale place trying to pretend it’s something more. There’s a lot of complicated seafood on the menu, and when Wanda spies the huge tanks of tropical fish that surround the tables, she feels a little bad about it.

Rhodey starts off what seems like a never-ending series of toasts, and by the time her food arrives, Wanda feels a pleasant buzz. Helen’s arm keeps brushing against hers, and the sensation keeps her grounded. She can’t stop watching the little fish darting around in the tanks, their colors flashing in sequence. It’s amazing to watch their little lives play out, wondering what alliances and rivalries there might be in the tank. She doesn’t realize she’s given them all names in her head until she’s ordering dessert.

“Do you want some of mine?” Helen asks. The bluish light from the tank plays across her cheekbones, and highlights her dark eyes. If Wanda closed her eyes, she could imagine she was by the pond in Sokovia again, with Sokovian sun against her face. 

When Wanda nods, Helen hands over her spoon.

|

“Lift your shoulders a little,” Steve coaches the next morning, frowning critically at Wanda’s stance. Wanda feels ridiculous and out of place standing in a tank with her knuckles wrapped up, but Steve had been so kind about the suggestion, and she doesn’t want to be a burden to the team. Like her, Clint is also a longer-range fighter, but he can defend himself up-close, too. She’s the odd one out. 

Wanda admires Natasha so deeply, as well, wants to be like her. She can imagine Natasha giving a little half-smile if in a few months Wanda could show her that she can hold her own, that she doesn’t need to be coddled and protected. It’s that which makes her open up her legs a little, try to get down into herself the way she’s supposed to.

“Like this?” she asks, and she’s rewarded by one of Steve’s big beaming smiles. She tries not to think about the fact that it’s the same way he looks when he sees a little kid dressed like him.

“Yeah, that’s great, Wanda. Throw a few more for me so I can check your form, and then we’ll get some gloves on you and get you in front of a bag.”

He looks so excited that she feels herself smiling, too. _Can you see me, brother?_ she thinks. There’s a breeze from somewhere in the gym that blows against the sweat on her shoulders, and she can imagine it’s his hands, urging her on like she’s a prizefighter.

When she gets out of the session, Helen is waiting at the door to the gym, grinning and carrying two smoothies. They look completely incongruous with her lab scrubs. Steve nods at Helen in that way that always makes Wanda think he should have lived in a time when everyone constantly tipped their hats to each other, and then he leaves them alone.

“I thought you might like something cold,” Helen says, handing the pinker cup over. When Wanda drinks, it’s clear it’s full of strawberries and raspberries, her favorites. Helen’s is mostly blue with blueberries, but Wanda knows from bitter, disgusting experience that there will be an ungodly amount of banana in there as well. Ugh.

“How did you know I was down here?” Wanda asks. It’s silly, but she feels kind of pleased that Helen is seeing her like this, damp with exertion. Like if someone other than Steve knows about it then what she’s doing is real, and she really is changing.

“I came looking for my best lab assistant,” Helen says, and despite herself, Wanda feels a flush swoop up from her collarbones. “And I saw you practicing in there with the Captain, so I thought I’d come back later.”

The flush roars hotter.

“You saw me?” Wanda asks, wishing her voice weren’t so squeaky. Helen laughs. Wanda really likes her laugh – it’s not the high-pitched, look-at-me laugh of the cruel girls who Wanda desperately wanted to be like in school. It’s honest, and musical, and a little too loud for someone her size.

“Don’t worry, you looked great!" she says, linking her arm through Wanda’s and starting them walking in the direction of the lab. Wanda has a second to freak out that maybe she smells or she’s getting Helen’s arm damp, but when she tries to pull away a little Helen only tugs her closer. “You can shower later: we’re about to make a breakthrough.”

|

In the shower that evening, Wanda thinks about Helen’s face as she looked down the microscope, how Wanda could tell that Helen had found what she was looking for even before she looked up at Wanda, her face creased in happiness, and grabbed Wanda’s elbow, telling her excitedly to come over and take a look. 

Eating her dinner in the mess hall, another English book resting forgotten in one hand, she thinks about Helen explaining, very patiently, the immune system responses she was provoking in the tissue samples she’s working with now. It was restful, Helen’s soft voice washing over her, Bruce tinkering with glass vials over the lab sink. No decisions to make, and nothing to worry about. Just Helen’s voice, never asking how she is, never mentioning Pietro, or Ultron, or Sokovia, creating another world for Wanda to escape to for a few hours.

Later, in the common quarters, she’s so engrossed reading small print about hotel amenities that she doesn’t hear Steve walk in until he speaks.

“Thinking of running out on us?” he asks playfully, nodding towards the double-page spread on the Dominican Republic that Wanda has open. Wanda jumps guiltily.

“Oh, I – no,” she says, flushing and closing the brochure. It’s not really her property, is it, and maybe she shouldn’t be messing around with it. She darts a look up into Steve’s face, but his eyebrows are drawn together not in anger but in consternation. It’s the same look he wears when she surprises him in the gym, gets a good punch in.

“You know, you could go,” he says, his tone thoughtful, like he’s just realising it herself now that he’s saying it aloud. “It would be good for you. You don’t have to be here twenty-four-seven just because... Some people are. I keep getting told there’s this thing called work-life balance now.”

He gives a little rueful smile there, because Steve’s favorite jokes are usually the ones that come at his own expense. Wanda swallows and closes the brochure.

“That… It is a nice idea, Steve,” she says. She stumbles over his first name less these days, but it still gets a little stuck on the way up her throat, so it comes out dry. She hitches up a smile, as if what she’s about to say is a joke, just like his. A little laugh at her own expense. “But who would go with me?”

She regrets it immediately. It doesn’t come out right – it comes out sad and quiet, not like when Clint jokes about Budapest, when someone glibly makes reference to how Natasha could gut a man blindfolded with a rusty spoon. They’re all so good at making pain funny, but Wanda isn’t, at least not yet. Steve’s face falls so fast it’s almost comical.

Wanda has this thing that she’d never, ever tell anyone about. Sometimes she imagines Pietro is actually beside her. She imagines his expressions, the solid presence of him, even his smell. Right now she opens her clenched fist, just a fraction. She imagines the air that filters in is solid. Pietro’s warm fingers closing around hers, keeping her tethered to the turning earth.

“There are plenty of people round here who need a vacation,” Steve says. He says it offhand, light, like it too is a joke. Wanda nods once, tightly, staring down at her knees.

“I had someone I wanted to see the world with, too,” he goes on, voice much softer, as though they’re the only two people in the whole building, as though Sam isn’t talking to Rhodey in the corridor on the other side of the glass wall; as if the security cameras aren’t recording all this, crystal clear. Wanda swallows against a sudden, painful lump in her throat.

“Those grief counselling sessions we offered are still on the table,” he says, equally softly, and reaches out a hand to lay it on her shoulder. Somehow that’s the worst thing. That’s the thing she can’t deal with. “Anytime you decide you want them, they’re there.”

Wanda nods again. He doesn’t move his hand. She can’t decide if she wants him to leave, or if she wants to climb up into his lap, pretend that his cologne is the cheap, clean scent that Pietro had worn too much of every day since he was thirteen. Steve Rogers smells smoky, woody. Pietro had smelled like teenage bravado, too heavy on the musk, enough to be thick in the throat. A boy trying to be a man. And for who?

“Yes, I know,” she says. Her voice is scratchy like she hasn’t spoken in a century. “Thank you.”

|

Helen knocks on Wanda’s door early one morning a week later. Since… everything, Wanda only sleeps in fits and starts, a few hours here and there in the middle of the night. In between, she walks around the Compound as quietly as she can, or reads in her bed, forcing herself to concentrate. As a result she’s normally fuzzy in the early morning, but she doesn’t think that’s the only thing that makes Helen’s behavior seem.. a little intense.

“We’re going to breakfast,” Helen says immediately once the door’s open. She’s already dressed in her lab wear, and looks immaculate. Wanda’s hair might get brushed these days, but she’s still fairly certain that right now she resembles someone who has been given an electric shock.

“I don’t - really eat breakfast,” Wanda says eventually. Her tongue is stuck to the roof of her mouth with sleep.

“I know, you’re never down in the mess hall in the mornings,” Helen says, with a fond look not unlike the one Steve gives her sometimes. Endeared, but not patronizing or pitying. It’s her favorite of his looks, and it looks perhaps even better on Helen. “But you’re really missing out. I think the whole of the scientific community could probably be fueled on the mess hall’s pancakes.”

“Okay, okay,” Wanda says, lifting a hand to stifle her yawn and reaching for her jacket. She doesn’t wear pyjamas to bed because she spends so much time wandering around at night, but she imagines that if nobody bats an eyelid at the… _ensembles_ Bruce seems to think are acceptable at lunchtime after he’s been up in the lab all night, she could wear pyjamas with immunity if she felt like it anyway. It doesn’t mean, of course, that she _wants_ to do it any time soon.

There’s a kind of weird nervous energy about Helen as they duly sit down to pancakes (and sometimes since coming to America Wanda has missed the thick stews and fluffy dumplings of her homeland, but _this_ kind of American food is definitely something she likes) and then move off to the lab. Helen usually moves around her work with an amazing serenity, but this morning she’s jittery, like she’s hiding something.

Wanda is just about to pull off her lab goggles with frustration and ask what’s going on when Helen finally seems to break of her own accord.

“Oh, I can’t do this anymore,” she says, and she looks so perfectly suspended between frustration and effervescent excitement – an interesting look on her pretty face – that Wanda would laugh if she wasn’t so full of trepidation at what might be coming.

“Come on,” she says, “I want to show you something.”

|

Wanda has never been on the roof of the Compound. In the early days she might have been too tempted to jump off, and after that there was just no reason to go.

“It’s over here,” Helen says, pointing to what looks like a miniature park in the opposite corner. Someone has laid a lawn, and there are standing trellises, with flowers starting to climb them. It looks only half-finished, but it also looks lovely.

“Sam started it,” Helen explains. “It’s supposed to be a therapy garden. He was the one who knew what to do when I came and asked if the roof was solid enough to support a pond.”

When Wanda steps into the garden, she can’t believe what she’s seeing. Helen has – or Sam has, or someone has – installed a koi pond. The fat, sleek, beautiful fish float under the surface like clouds moving across the sky.

“This is… For me?” she asks. She feels this terrible clenching sensation in her throat like she’s about to cry. 

“I saw you looking at the fish in that restaurant last week. And… It’s your birthday today, isn’t it?” she says, and it isn’t really a question. “I was supposed to wait until the surprise party tonight to tell you, but…”

Wanda winces, but it’s so strange because her mouth is trying to smile at the same time.

“Surprise… party?” she asks. It sounds like a nightmare, but she’s still touched.

“I talked them down to just drinks,” Helen says, winking.

“Thanks for the warning,” Wanda says gratefully. Then she does what she’s wanted to do ever since she saw them: she gets down on her belly in the grass surrounding the stones that mark the edges of the pond and stares down into the water. To Wanda’s surprise, Helen gets down on her other side.

“How many are there?” Wanda asks.

“Five,” Helen says, “for now. You could always get more.”

Wanda reaches out her hand and trails a fingertip over the water. The fish, just underneath, look like beautiful ghosts.

“You should name one of them,” Wanda says. She can almost feel Helen’s wince.

“Ah, I’m not very good at things like that,” she demurs. Wanda nudges her, carefully, with an elbow.

“Okay,” Helen relents, “don’t push me in to make a point. I’ll call that one… Spot.”

She points to the lone koi with a dark splodge on its back. Wanda says nothing.

“I know,” Helen says, laughing a little, covering her face with her hands. “I’m sorry.”

They lie peacefully for another five minutes. Wanda feels as though she's floating up out of herself, as though Helen is, somehow, breathing next to her back in her aunt's country garden. She wonders constantly what has happened to that house, who lives there now. She hopes the new owners have children who love it like she did, that the parents are as kind and good as her aunt was. 

“My birthday is his birthday, too,” Wanda says. She hates herself for bringing it up.

“I know,” Helen says, and she leans over just enough to graze the cap of her shoulder against Wanda’s.

“Happy birthday, Pietro,” Helen says, very quietly. It occurs to Wanda that if she cried now, lying like this, then the koi pond could swallow her tears, and no-one but Helen would know.

Pietro would know, though. Pietro had always said he didn’t want a grave, that he didn’t want people – didn’t want Wanda, he meant - to go on sad pilgrimages to it at happy times of the year. Wanda had thought they’d die together, and so it wouldn’t matter anyway, but then when the time did come she honored his wishes. Pietro was cremated, and Wanda let his wind take the ashes. It means that he’s everywhere, that he’s always with her. It means he would know, so she holds it in and leans, just a little, into the shoulder against hers.

|

The “surprise” drinks don’t stop at just drinks, of course. Wanda hadn’t thought they would. At midnight, all the Avengers are crammed into a tiny, divey karaoke bar on the other side of town. Wanda hadn’t thought she’d want to sing today, but somehow the aching hoarseness that comes with screaming into a microphone makes her feel pleasantly numb all over. At peace, like she’s back with her fish.

Helen, wearing a simple, sleek black dress, has never looked more beautiful, and she hasn’t left Wanda’s side all night. When Wanda watches her join Natasha in a corny rendition of _Sisters Are Doing It For Themselves_ , Wanda realizes she has a problem.

How do you tell someone you love them, she wonders. With Pietro there was never any difficulty; it was like breathing, that unconscious, that constant, that necessary. It wasn’t the first thing Wanda ever said, but it feels like it was. It was the first thing she said when she was born for the second time, when they were pulled from the rubble. That’s a memory she doesn’t select often from the shelf, but she doesn’t need to. It’s always there.

“Come on, Wanda!” Helen says, skipping back over in her torturously high heels and thrusting the microphone towards her. “The birthday girl should sing another song!”

Wanda gets a little unsteadily to her feet. She has time to work out how to tell Helen what she feels; to ask her, maybe, if she wants to see the world with Wanda. There’s time for everything. Pietro gave her that gift.

She knows exactly what she’s going to sing, and queuing it up on the machine makes the others burst into raucous, drunken shouts of _I know this, I love that song!_

“I don’t,” Steve says, for perhaps the fiftieth time, and Natasha good-naturedly shoves a pillow in his face.

Wanda smiles as the old familiar beat starts. Against the tuneless, joyful backup of her friends, she begins to sing the first English song she ever learned.


End file.
